r the past, and when he gets
bullied and ill-used it makes him look savage and fierce, of course.

"Well," said Nic, after a thoughtful pause, "I can keep him in his place
and yet be civil to him. I'm not going to jump on a man because he has
done wrong; and I don't see why he shouldn't be forgiven--if he deserves
it, of course, and--somehow, though I don't like him, I seem to like him
a good deal, and that's about as big a puzzle as some of the things in
mathematics, and--" This next was aloud:

"Oh, murder! Needles and pins! Wasps and hornets! Oh!"

Nic had jumped up, to begin dancing about, slapping his legs, shaking
his trousers, pulling off his shoes, and trying hard to get rid of
something that was giving him intense pain.

"It's those bees!" he cried. "They've got up the legs of my trousers;
and he said they had no stings. No! ants!--You nasty, miserable,
abominable little wretches--no, big wretches," he muttered, as he picked
off and crushed one by one the virulent creatures, which had made a
lodgment upon his legs and evidently come to the conclusion that they
were good to eat.

He soon freed himself; but the tingling, poisonous nature of their bites
was still very evident, and excited an intense desire to rub and
scratch.

"Why, there's quite a regiment of the little vicious wretches!" cried
the boy as he was going back to where his gun stood by the tree. "I
suppose they smelt me."

It seemed so for the moment, for a long line of the ants could be traced
through the grass on and on; and then Nic uttered an exclamation, sprang
forward and caught up his specimen, to hold it at arm's length and begin
shaking it.

"Why, it's covered with them," he cried, as he swept them off, got them
on his hands, saw them racing up his arms, and found them so quick and
so tight-clinging that the task grew painful in the extreme before he
could get rid of them, and when he did he tossed the rumpled, disfigured
bird back amongst his enemies.

"There!" he cried: "eat it then. It's completely spoiled. What a pity
I did not let it live!"

"Never mind, Nic," said his father that evening, as he sat at home,
giving himself from time to time a vicious rub. "Take it as a lesson.
We all have to go through that sort of thing, and you'll know better
next time. But it was a fine specimen, you say?"

"Lovely," replied Nic eagerly; but he did not say a word about who shot
the bird, for he felt that if he did his father